Surveillance Drone [WIP]

Bluestemos

Hey,
After a too long of a time not having any projects finished, I wanted to actually finish one. So now I'm making this small surveillance drone and making quite good progress with it. It's one of my first hard-surface projects, so it also kind of acts as practice. 
Here's a quick render of the model in Cinema 4D. Critiques, tips and feedback are all very welcome!  



It's still in progress and lacks parts like a few cables, textures and a rig, but I hope this pic shows what I'm going for with the project.
I didn't have a concept to start with, so that may or may not show in the model, but I'm trying my best to plan ahead as I go.  

Bluestemos

Shinigami said:

nice so far. Isnt it a pain to model in c4d?

Thanks, much appreciated. Yeah, modeling in C4D is kind of okay for the most part, but I keep having trouble with vertex normals and smaller things like aligning points on an angular plane, but it's actually really fast to model in when you learn how to deal with some of the quirks it has. I've yet to come across a way to replace its' horrible UV tools though. The main reasons I'm using it are because I've already been using it for about 5 years now and gotten used to it - and I currently have a free 3 year student license, which I want to take advantage of.

afocht

Looking good so far, are you going to go through with a low-poly version of it? Also, kudos for working in Cinema. It has its quirks like you said, but it's not bad after you've had some experience with it. Love that program. (Minus the UV tools).

indierocktopus

Shinigami said:

nice so far. Isnt it a pain to model in c4d?

I use C4d too! It's got pretty great procedural tools and parametric objects, so I use it for super quick greyboxing / level design concepting.
As for other assets: yeah I use maya ... C4Ds UV tools are soooooo hard to work with, but I like body paint for texturing

Bluestemos

Okay, it's time for a relatively small update:


I did some work on the wings, the body, the lamp and fixed some topology errors I hadn't noticed before. I'm kind of struggling with deciding whether to add more detail to the body and the motors via extra geo, or if I should add the detail with textures and normal maps. The thing is, as I want to keep the model relatively believable, I don't want to have its' aerodynamics suffer or make it too noisy.

afocht said:

Looking good so far, are you going to go through with a low-poly version of it? Also, kudos for working in Cinema. It has its quirks like you said, but it's not bad after you've had some experience with it. Love that program. (Minus the UV tools).

Thanks! Yeah, my plan is to make the whole asset from start to finish, and I'm currently working on the high poly, as you can see.

It really is quite obvious C4D isn't that common in this industry, but it's understandable why that is  I've tried to make a switch from it multiple times, but I just feel so comfortable working with it.

indierocktopus said: Shinigami said: nice so far. Isnt it a pain to model in c4d?
I use C4d too! It's got pretty great procedural tools and parametric objects, so I use it for super quick greyboxing / level design concepting.
As for other assets: yeah I use maya ... C4Ds UV tools are soooooo hard to work with, but I like body paint for texturing
 The parametric objects are definitely quite nice, though I find it quite annoying how every parametric object with a cap has the cap's polys disconnected from the other polygons in the object, and I always have to manually connect them or make the cap myself - not a big of a deal, but it just gets in the way sometimes.